Anthropology

Encounter

and the Colonial

TALAL ASAD

British functional anthropology began to emerge as a distinctive discipline shortly after World War I through the efforts of Malinowski and
Radcliffe-Brown, but it was not until after World War II that it gained an
assured academic status in the universities. Compared with the two
decades before World War II an enormous quantity of anthropological
writing was published in the two decades after it. Within this brief period
its claim to academic respectability was virtually unchallenged. By 1961 a
prominent sociologist could write that "social anthropology is, among
other things, a small but I think flourishing profession. The subject, like
social work and unlike sociology, has prestige" (MacRae 1961:36). A
few years later a political scientist contrasted social anthropology favorably with sociology, declaring that unlike the latter, but like the other
bona fide social sciences, social anthropology "had built up a body of
knowledge which cannot readily be described as anything else"
(Runciman 1965:47).
Functional anthropology had barely secured its enviable academic
reputation when some serious misgivings began to make themselves felt
from within the established profession. In 1961 Leach claimed that
"functionalist doctrine [has] ceased to carry conviction" (1961:1). Five
years later Worsley wrote his trenchant critique under the significant title
"The end of anthropology?" By 1970 Needham was arguing that social
anthropology "has no unitary and continuous past so far as ideas are
concerned. . . . Nor is there any such thing as a rigorous and coherent
body of theory proper to social anthropology" (1970:36-37). A year
later Ardener observed that
Originally prepared for and also appearing in: Towards a Marxist anthropology: problems
and perspectives, edited by Stanley Diamond, World Anthropology (in press).

86

TALAL ASAD

. . . something has already happened to British anthropology (and to international

anthropology in related ways) such that for practical purposes text-books which
looked useful, no longer are; monographs which used to appear exhaustive now
seem selective; interpretations which once looked full of insight now seem
mechanical and lifeless (1971:449).
The plausibility of the anthropological enterprise which seemed so selfevident to all its practitioners a mere decade before, was now no longer
quite so self-evident. A small minority, apart from the names just mentioned, had begun to articulate its doubts in radical terms. 1
What had happened to British social anthropology? At the organizational level nothing very disturbing had happened. On the contrary, the
Association of Social Anthropologists flourished as never before; it held
annual academic conferences whose proceedings were regularly published in handsome hardcover and paperback editions. Monographs,
articles, and textbooks by writers calling themselves anthropologists
appeared in increasing number. A prestigious series of annual lectures on
social anthropology was launched under the auspices of the British
Academy. The subject was taught in more university and college departments than ever before; the profession even negotiated to introduce it as
a sixth-form option in schools. Seen in terms of its public activity, there
was no crisis in social anthropology.
On the whole, professional leaders of British anthropology were not
impressed by alarmist talk about crisis (see, for example, Lewis 1968).
They would maintain, if pressed, that as the older ideas of social anthropology became exhausted, it was natural that one should turn to fresh
sources of supply.2 They preferred to talk of increasing specialization,
which they saw as a sign of the intellectual vitality of the professsion
(Gluckman, Eggan 1965); and more positively, they affirmed that classic
functionalist assumptions were still viable (Social Science Research
Council 1968).
Yet we would be well-advised not to be too easily persuaded by such
bland assurances. After all, there is a tendency among establishment
leaders to maintain at least the myth if not the reality of smooth continuity. There can be no doubt that at the ideological level something had
indeed "already happened to British anthropology" as Ardener put it,
although this event is better seen as a disintegration of the "old anthropology" rather than as a crystallization of the "new."
There was a time when social anthropology could and did define itself
1

The most interesting of these included Banaji (1970), Copans (1971), and Leclerc
(1972).
It is this line of reasoning that Firth (1972) adopted to explain and endorse the recent
anthropological interest in Marx. See for example the Introduction by Max Gluckman and
Fred Eggan to the first four volumes in the ASA Monographs series and the Social Science
Research Council's Research in social anthropology (1968).

Anthropology

and the Colonial Encounter

87

unambiguously as the study of primitive societies. As Nadel wrote shortly

after World War II:
The scope of any science is to obtain and extend knowledge. In social anthropology as it is commonly understood we attempt to extend our knowledge of man
and society to "primitive" communities, "simpler peoples", or "preliterate
societies" . . . If an anthropologist asks naively why, if we are only interested in
studying society writ large, we should turn to primitive cultures rather than our
own civilization . . . the answer is simply that our own society is not the only one,
and its phenomena not the same as those found, or apt to be found, in primitive
society (1953:2).
Statements of this kind do not indicate a very sophisticated concern for
the definition of a problem, but they reflect an element of pragmatic
truth, and it is this that gave social anthropology a practical plausibility.
When Evans-Pritchard wrote the well-known Introduction to his Social
anthropology it seemed reasonably clear what the subject was about. As
he explained:
The social anthropologist studies primitive societies directly, living among them
for months or years, whereas sociological research is usually from documents and
largely statistical. The social anthropologist studies societies as wholes he
studies their ecologies, their economics, their legal and political institutions, their
family and kinship organizations, their religions, their technologies, their arts,
etc., as parts of general social systems (1951:11).
The doctrines and approaches that went by the name of functionalism
thus gave social anthropology an assured and coherent style.
Today by contrast, even this coherence of style is absent. The anthropologist now is someone who studies societies both "simple" and "complex"; resorts to participant observation, statistical techniques, historical
archives, and other literary sources; finds himself intellectually closer to
economists or political scientists or psychoanalysts or structural linguists
or animal behaviorists than he does to other anthropologists. To describe
this state of affairs in terms of scholarly specialization is surely to indulge
in mystification. The "cognate disciplines" of politics, economics, etc.
were in existence long before the classical (functionalist) phase of social
anthropology. The question that must be asked is, why was it only
comparatively recently that they were discovered by anthropologists?
Why was it, for example, that in 1940 anthropologists could write: "We
have not found that the theories of political philosophers have helped us
to understand the societies we have studied and we consider them of little
scientific value" (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1961); and in 1966: "We
consider that the time is ripe for a dialogue, if not for marriage between
anthropology and the other disciplines concerned with comparative politics" (Swartz et al. 1966:9). What had made the time ripe? How was it

88

that the separate disciplines (economics, politics, jurisprudence, etc.)

which reflected the fragmented self-understanding of bourgeois society,
with its own historical contradictions, had become ready to inspire
anthropology?
The answer I would suggest is to be sought in the fact that since World
War II, fundamental changes had occurred in the world which social
anthropology inhabited, changes which affected the object, the ideological support, and the organizational base of social anthropology itself. And
in noting these changes we remind ourselves that anthropology does not
merely apprehend the world in which it is located, but that the world also
determines how anthropology will apprehend it.
The attainment of political independence by colonial countries (especially African) in the late 1950's and early 1960's accelerated the trend,
apparent since the war, of socioeconomic change: the planned development of national networks of communications, electrification, and broadcasting; the promotion of education and of rural improvement projects;
the shift of political power from "tribal" leaders to the nationalist
bourgeoisie, etc. Mainly as a consequence of nationalist expectations,
scholars had begun to rediscover an indigenous history.3 Some nationalist
writers denounced the colonial connections of anthropology. Thus
increasingly the larger political-economic system thrust itself obtrusively
into the anthropologist's framework, as did the relevance of the past, both
colonial and precolonial.
At another level, mounting criticism of the functionalist tradition in
American mainstream sociology contributed indirectly to undermining
functionalist doctrine in British social anthropology. 4 Because it had
never adequately clarified the distinction between a totalizing method (in
which the formation of parts is explained with reference to a developing
structure of determinations) and ethnographic holism (in which the different "institutions" of a society are all described and linked one to
another); 5 and since it had in general confused structural determination
3

Anthropology

TALAL ASAD

This was achieved partly by challenging the functional anthropologist's dogma that only
written records could provide a reliable basis for reconstructing history (Vansina 1965). The
general tendency of functional anthropology was to assimilate indigenous history to the
category of myth, i.e. to view it in terms of instrumentality rather than of truth in the
classical, nonpragmatist sense.
4
Leading sociologists in America, e.g. Parsons, Merton, and Homans, had always taken
an active and sympathetic interest in British social anthropology, and their writings in turn
were a source of inspiration and support to functional anthropologists. The attack on
American structural-functionalism by such writers as Ralf Dahrendorf and C. Wright Mills
was bound therefore to affect the doctrinal self-confidence of British social anthropology.
5
That this distinction remains unclear to many anthropologists even today is apparent
from the over-confident remarks of Levi-Strauss in his polemic against Sartre: "It is possible
that the requirement of 'totalization' is a great novelty to some historians, sociologists and
psychologists. It has been taken for granted by anthropologists ever since they learnt it from
Malinowski.. : (The savage mind, 1966:250). What anthropologists learnt from Malinowski
was ethnographic holism, not the method of totalization.

and the Colonial Encounter

89

with simultaneity, concrete developments in the world outside pushed

functional anthropology until it collapsed into microsociology. So it is
that today most anthropologists have chosen to reorient themselves in
relation to a multitude of fragmentary problems political, economic,
domestic, cultic, etc. at a "small-scale" level, and have found in this
state of fragmentation their sense of intellectual direction provided by
their relevant "cognate discipline."
These changes in the object of study and in the ideological supports of
social anthropology might by themselves have led to a disintegration of
the discipline, but the same postwar period witnessed a significant
development in the organizational base of social anthropology which
saved it. In 1946 the Association of Social Anthropologists of the British
Commonwealth (ASA) was founded with less than 20 members; by 1962
the membership had risen to over 150, "even though election to membership required normally both the holding of a teaching or a research post in
the Commonwealth and the attainment of either a post-graduate degree
(usually a doctorate) or substantial publications." 6 Once this base was in
effective operation, social anthropology as institutionalized practice
could dispense with the doctrinal specificity it had previously insisted on.
Professional distinctiveness could now be maintained through an established network of vested interests fpr.which the ASA was a coordinating agency rather than by any particular doctrines or methods.
Anthropology was now truly a "profession."
Ironically, the same forces that were contributing to the ideological
dissolution of classical functional anthropology had also contributed to a
strengthening of its organizational base. Thus Fortes noted that during
World War II in Britain,
. . . economic, political and especially military necessities aroused a new and lively
public interest in the African and Asiatic dependencies of Britain and her allies.
The plans for post-war economic and social development in these areas generated
under pressure of war-time, experiences included big schemes of research in the
natural and social sciences. The' boom in anthropological studies thus foreshadowed began after Radcliffe-BlrowYi had retired from the Oxford chair [in
1946] (1949:xiii).
It was in the year of Radcliffe-Brown's retirement that the ASA was
founded by scholars who were already members of the long-established
but far less exclusive Royal Anthropological Institute. An exclusive
"professional" organization was clearly far better placed to exploit the
new funding possibilities for research in the changing power pattern of
the postwar world.
6

See Gluckman and Eggan (1965:xii). By 1968 the Association had about 240 members
(Social Science Research Council: 79).

90

TALAL ASAD

It is not a matter of dispute that social anthropology emerged as a

distinctive discipline at the beginning of the colonial era, that it became a
flourishing academic profession toward its close, or that throughout this
period its efforts were devoted to a description and analysiscarried out
by Europeans, for a European audience of non-European societies
dominated by European power. And yet there is a strange reluctance on
the part of most professional anthropologists to consider seriously the
power structure within which their discipline has taken shape. The typical
attitude is well represented by the following passage by Victor Turner in
which the problem of the relationship between anthropology and colonialism is trivialized and dismissed in the space of two short paragraphs:
It used to be argued by officials of the ancien regime that anthropologists,
immersed as they were in the specificities of African life, came to accept the
structural perspective of their informants, became their spokesmen, and by their
words and works impeded the efforts of district and provincial administrators to
govern efficiently. Some were even accused by white settlers and European civil
servants of being "Reds," "socialists," and "anarchists." It is now asseverated by
African leaders and administrators, down to the district level, that anthropologists before independence were "apologists of colonialism" and subtle agents of
colonial supremacy who studied African customs merely to provide the dominant
white minority with information damaging to native interests but normally
opaque to white investigation. Thus yesterday's "socialist" has become today's
"reactionary." Sir Alan Burns [1957] and Frantz Fanon [1961] are improbably
allied.
It is true, of course, that in their personal capacity anthropologists, like
everyone else, have a wide spectrum of political views. Some are known "conservatives"; others lean far to the "left." But as professionals, anthropologists are
trained, over almost as many years as doctors, to collect certain kinds of information as "participant observers" which will enable them, whatever may be their
personal views, to present as objectively as the current level of their discipline's
development permits, a coherent picture of the sociocultural system they have
elected to spend some years of their lives in studying, and of the kinds of processes
that go on in it. It is their ultimate duty to publish their findings and expose them,
together with an exact description of the means by which they were obtained, to
the international public of their anthropological colleagues and beyond that to the
"world of learning." Eventually, news of their work and analyses, through their
own "popular" writings or through citations, resumes (not infrequently bowdlerized) and digests by non-anthropologists, seeps through to the general reading
public. Time thus winnows their reports and rids them of much that is biased and
"loaded." There is no point in special pleading or tendentious argument; there
are professional standards against which all reports are measured, and, in the end,
the common sense of the common man (1971:1-2).
But to speak about "professional standards" and the authority of "common sense" is surely no less naive than are wild remarks about anthropology being merely the handmaiden of colonialism. There are today no
clear-cut standards in anthropology, there is only a flourishing professional organization; and the common sense of Western common man,

Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter

91

himself an alienated and exploited being, is hardly reliable as a critical test

of anthropological knowledge. And yet the easy assurance of Turner's
remarks is itself an indication of the kind of commonsense world that the
typical anthropologist still shares, and knows he shares, with those whom
he primarily addresses.
We have been reminded time and again by anthropologists of the ideas
and ideals of the Enlightenment in which the intellectual inspiration of
anthropology is supposed to lie (see, for example, Evans-Pritchard 1951;
Harris 1968; Firth 1972). But anthropology is also rooted in an unequal
power encounter between the West and the Third World which goes back
to the emergence of bourgeois Europe, an encounter in which colonialism is merely one historical moment. 7 It is this encounter that gives the
West access to cultural and historical information about the societies it
has progressively dominated, and thus not only generates a certain kind
of universal understanding but also reenforces the inequalities in capacity
between the European and the non-European worlds (and derivatively,
between the Europeanized elites and the "traditional" masses in the
Third World). We are today becoming increasingly aware of the fact that
information and understanding produced by bourgeois disciplines like
anthropology are acquired and used most readily by those with the
greatest capacity for exploitation. This follows partly from the structure
of research, but more especially from the way in which these disciplines
objectify their knowledge. It is because the powerful who support
research expect the kind of understanding which will ultimately confirm
them in their world that anthropology has not very easily turned to the
production of radically subversive forms of understanding. It is because
anthropological understanding is overwhelmingly objectified in European languages that it is most easily accommodated to the mode of life
(and hence to the rationality) of the world power which the West represents.
We must begin from the fact that the basic reality which made prewar
social anthropology a feasible and effective enterprise was the power
relationship between dominating (European) and dominated (nonEuropean) cultures. We then need to ask ourselves how this relationship
has affected the practical preconditions of social anthropology; the uses
to which its knowledge was put; the theoretical treatment of particular
topics; the mode of perceiving and objectifying alien societies; and the
anthropologist's claim to political neutrality.
The colonial power structure made the object of anthropological study
accessible and safe because of it, sustained proximity between the
observing European and the living non-European became a practical
7

Claude Levi-Strauss was one of the first anthropologists to note this important fact,
although he has barely gone beyond noting it (1967:51-52).

92

TALAL ASAD

Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter

93

possibility. It made possible the kind of human intimacy on which anthropological fieldwork is based, but ensured that that intimacy should be
one-sided and provisional. It is worth noting that virtually no European
anthropologist has been won over personally to the subordinated culture
he has studied; although countless non-Europeans, having come to the
West to study its culture, have been captured by its values and assumptions, and have contributed to an understanding of it. The reason for this
asymmetry is the dialectic of world power.
Anthropologists can claim to have contributed to the cultural heritage
of the societies they study by a sympathetic recording of indigenous forms
of life that would otherwise be lost to posterity. But they have also
contributed, sometimes indirectly, toward maintaining the structure of
power represented by the colonial system. That such contributions were
not in the final reckoning crucial for the vast empire which received
knowledge and provided patronage does not mean that they were not
critical for the small discipline which offered knowledge and received that
patronage. For the structure of power certainly affected the theoretical
choice and treatment of what social anthropology objectified more so
in some matters than in others. Its analyses of holistic politics most of
all, of cosmological systems least of all were affected by a readiness to
adapt to colonial ideology. (Once should, in any case, avoid the tendency
found among some critics and defenders of social anthropology to speak
as though the doctrines and analyses labelled functionalism were parts of
a highly integrated logical structure.) At any rate the general drift of
anthropological understanding did not constitute a basic challenge to the
unequal world represented by the colonial system. Nor was the colonial
system as such within which the social objects studied were located
analyzed by the social anthropologist. To argue that the anthropologist's
expertise did not qualify him to consider such a system fruitfully is to
confess that this expertise was malformed. For any object which is subordinated and manipulated is partly the product of a power relationship,
and to ignore this fact is to misapprehend the nature of that object.

he was sometimes accusingly called "a Red," "a socialist," or "an anarchist" by administrators and settlers, did this not merely reveal one facet
of the hysterically intolerant character of colonialism as a system, with
which he chose nevertheless to live professionally at peace?
I believe it is a mistake to view social anthropology in the colonial era as
primarily an aid to colonial administration, or as the simple reflection of
colonial ideology. I say this not because I subscribe to the anthropological
establishment's comfortable view of itself, but because bourgeois consciousness, of which social anthropology is merely one fragment, has
always contained within itself profound contradictions and amibiguities
and therefore the potentiality for transcending itself. For these
contradictions to be adequately apprehended it is essential to turn to the
historical power relationship between the West and the Third World and
to examine the ways in which it has been dialectically linked to the
practical conditions, the working assumptions, and the intellectual product of all disciplines representing the European understanding of nonEuropean humanity.

Clearly the anthropologist's claim to political neutrality cannot be

separated from all that has been said so far. Thus the scientific definition
of anthropology as a disinterested (objective, value-free) study of "other
cultures" helped to mark off the anthropologist's enterprise from that of
colonial Europeans (the trader, the missionary, the administrator, and
other men of practical affairs); but did it not also render him unable to
envisage and argue for a radically different political future for the subordinate people he objectified and thus serve to merge that enterprise in
effect with that of dominant status-quo Europeans? If the anthropologist
sometimes endorsed or condemned particular social changes affecting
"his people," did he, in this ad hoc commitment, do any more or any less
than many colonial Europeans who accepted colonialism as a system? If

1949 Social structure. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

FORTES, MEYER, E. E. EVANS-PRITCHARD, editors
1961 African political systems. London: Oxford University Press. (Originally
published 1940).

REFERENCES
ARDENER, EDWIN

1971 The new anthropology and its critics. Man 6(3):449.

BANAJI, JAIRUS

1970 The crisis of British anthropology. New Left Review (64):71-85.

COPANS

1971 Pour une histoire et une sociologie des etudes Africaines. Cahiers des
Etudes Africaines (43).
EVANS-PRITCHARD, E. E.

1951 Social anthropology. London: Cohen and West.

FIRTH, RAYMOND

1972 The sceptical anthropologist? Social anthropology and Marxist views on

society. British Academy lecture.
FORTES, MEYER, editor

GLUCKMAN, MAX, FRED EGGAN

1965 "Introduction," in The relevance of models for social anthropology.

Association of Social Anthropologists of the British Commonwealth
Monograph.
HARRIS, MARVIN

1968 The rise of anthropological theory. London: Crowell.

LEACH, E. R.

1961 Rethinking anthropology. London: Athlone.

LECLERC, GERARD

1972 Anthropologic et colonialisme. Paris: Fayard.

1966 The savage mind. London.

94

TALAL ASAD

LEVI-STRAUSS, CLAUDE

1967

The scope of anthropology. London: J. Cape.

LEWIS, i. M., editor

1968 History and social anthropology. London: Tavistock.

MACRAE, DONALD G.

1961

Ideology and society. London: Heinemann.

NADEL, S. F.

1953

The foundations of social anthropology. London: Cohen and West.

NEEDHAM,RODNEY

1970

"The future of social anthropology: disintegration or metamorphosis?"

in Anniversary contributions to anthropology: twelve essays. Leiden:
Brill.

RUNCIMAN, W. G.

1965

Sociologese. Encounter 25(6):47.

SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL

1968 Research in social anthropology. London: Heinemann Educational.

SWARTZ, M. J., V. W. TURNER, A. TUDEN, editors
1966 Political anthropology. Chicago: Aldine.
TURNER, VICTOR

1971

"Introduction," in Colonialism in Africa 1870-1960,

London: Cambridge University Press.

volume three.

VANSINA, J.

1965

Oral tradition; a study in historical methodology. London: Routledge

and Kegan Paul.

World Anthropology

The Politics of Anthropology

From Colonialism and Sexism
Toward a View from Below

General Editor

Editors

SOL TAX

GERRIT HUIZER
BRUCE MANNHEIM

Patrons
CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS
MARGARET MEAD
LAILA SHUKRY EL HAMAMSY
M. N. SRINIVAS

MOUTON PUBLISHERS THE HAGUE PARIS

MOUTON PUBLISHERS THE H A G U E PARIS

General Editor's Preface

.Phi

Copyright 1979 by Mouton Publishers. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise without the
written permission of Mouton Publishers, The Hague
ISBN 90-279-7750-X (Mouton)
ISBN 0-202-90071-1 (AVC Inc.)
Indexes by Society of Indexers, Great Britain
Jacket photo by permission of
Stichting Landelijke Aktie Colombia, Amsterdam
Cover and jacket design by Jurriaan Schrofer
Phototypeset in V.I.P. Times by
Western Printing Services Ltd, Bristol
Printed in Great Britain

The Congress which created this book brought together all anthropologists, old and young, male and female, capitalist and socialist, industrialized and Third World. We talked about the scientific specialities
which had brought us together; but we had never been so highly conscious
of the common humanity which our differences clarified. So we talked as
never before of past illusions and of new roles, transcending, where we
could, our private preferences and interests. The result is this book, which
should be read together with the dozens of others on our special scientific
subjects. As those others justify to the world what we anthropologists do,
so this one explains why most of us do too little, often imperfectly, and too
late.
Like most contemporary sciences, anthropology is a product of the
European tradition. Some argue that it is a product of colonialism, with
one small and self-interested part of the species dominating the study of
the whole. If we are to understand the species, our science needs substantial input from scholars who represent a variety of the world's cultures. It
was a deliberate purpose of the IXth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences to provide impetus in this direction. The World Anthropology volumes, therefore, offer a first glimpse of
a human science in which members from all societies have played an
active role. Each of the books is designed to be self-contained; each is an
attempt to update its particular sector of scientific knowledge and is
written by specialists from all parts of the world. Each volume should be
read and reviewed individually as a separate volume on its own given
The symposium on "Ideology and Education of Anthropologists" was organized by Bruce
Mannheim who also undertook preliminary editing of the conference papers. Final editing
of the papers was done by Gerrit Huizer who assumes responsibility for the volume in its
present form.

Table of Contents

General Editor's Preface

SECTION ONE: INTRODUCTION

^Anthropology and Politics: From Naivete Toward Liberation?

by Gerrit Huizer

SECTION TWO: COLONIALISM IN ANTHROPOLOGY

7C The Counterrevolutionary Tradition in African Studies: The Case

of Applied Anthropology
by Omafume F. Onoge
Anthropologists and Their Terminologies: A Critical Review
by Ikenna Nzimiro
"^jT Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter
by Talal Asad

45

67

85

SECTION THREE: SEXISM IN ANTHROPOLOGY

Viricentrism and Anthropology

by Joke Schrijvers

97

x Table of Contents
Aboriginal Woman: Male and Female Anthropological
Perspectives
by Ruby Rohrlich-Leavitt, Barbara Sykes, and Elizabeth
Weatherford
"^Women, Development, and Anthropological Facts and Fictions
by Eleanor Leacock

Table of Contents

111

131

Anthropology, "Snooping," and Commitment: A View from

Papua New Guinea
by Andrew Strathern

269

275

Is Useful Action Research Possible?

by Nico Kielstra

281

145

How Can Revolutionary Anthropology Be Practiced?

by Robert Buijtenhuijs

291

Social Reality and the Anthropologists

by Ramkrishna Mukherjee

161

The Role of the Anthropologist in Minority Education: The

Chicano Case
by D. R. Porath

The Relevance of Contemporary Economic Anthropology

by Abdel Ghaffar M. Ahmed

171

Colonial and Postcolonial Anthropology of Africa: Scholarship or

Sentiment?
by Maxwell Owusu

Notes on the Present-Day State of Anthropology in the Third

World
by Georges Condominas
Anthropology = Ideology, Applied Anthropology = Politics
by Andre Gunder Frank

297

SECTION SEVEN: TOWARD A VIEW FROM BELOW AND FROM WITHIN

187

Participant Observation or Partisan Participation?

by Mina Davis Caulfield

309

201

On Objectivity in Fieldwork
by Carol Lopate

319

Breaking Through the Looking Glass: The View from Below

by Brooke Grundfest Schoepf

325

On Being a Native Anthropologist

by Khalil Nakhleh

343

Ethnology in a Revolutionary Setting

by June Nash

353

SECTION FIVE: FROM ACADEMIC COLONIALISM" TO

"COMMITTED ANTHROPOLOGY"

SECTION SIX: DILEMMAS OF ACTION RESEARCH AND COMMITMENT

Anthropology in Melanesia: Retrospect and Prospect

by Roger M. Keesing

SECTION FOUR: "ETHICAL QUESTION" OR "POLITICAL CHOICE"?

XI

l / The Social Responsibility of Anthropological Science in the

Context of Contemporary Brazil
by Shelton H. Davis

215

/ The Meaning of Wounded Knee, 1973: Indian Self-Government

and the Role of Anthropology
by Steve Talbot

227

From Applied to Committed Anthropology: Disengaging from

Our Colonialist Heritage
by Steven Polgar

259

SECTION EIGHT: ATTEMPTS AT LIBERATION ANTHROPOLOGY

On the Participant Study of Women's Movements:

Methodological, Definitional, and Action Considerations
by Gail Omvedt

373

xn Table of Contents
Research-Through-Action: Some Practical Experiences with
Peasant Organization
by Gerrit Huizer
Anthropology of the Multinational Corporation
by June Nash
Nationalism, Race-Class Consciousness, and Action Research on
Bougainville Island, Papua New Guinea
by Alexander F. Mamak
Research from Within and from Below: Reversing the Machinery
by Al Gedicks

SECTION ONE
395

421

447

461

Introduction

APPENDIX

Foundations on the Move

481

Biographical Notes

495

Index of Names

503

Index of Subjects

511